“She is in Inglese-in-the-valley, with the Chartres,” he told me. “Get your bonnet, dear, and a tremendous veil and come. I’ll run like a tortoise-shell and you shall toot the horn.”
I turned tremblingly to Pelleas for I had never been in a motor car. Lumbering electric hansoms and victorias had borne me, but the kneeling elephant was another matter. But Pelleas, being a man, is no more in awe of machinery than I am of chiffons; or than he is of chiffons; and he assented to Inglese quite simply.
“Very well, Hobart Eddy,” I said, “I will go. You are charming to want us. But bear in mind that I reserve the right to insist that you are running too fast, block by block. And if anything goes wrong very likely I shall catch at the brake.”
“I’ll lead the thing by the bridle if you say so,” he promised faithfully.
Presently we were free of the avenue, skimming the park, threading our way among an hundred excitements, en route to Inglese. Hobart Eddy was driving the machine himself and as I looked at his shoulders I found to my amazement that I was feeling a certain confidence. Hobart Eddy was one of the men whose shoulders—ah, well, it is among the hardships of life that one’s best reasons are never communicable. But I was feeling a certain confidence. And though a little alarm remained to prove me conservative I found myself also diverted. I remember trying when I was a child to determine at night in a thunder-storm which of me was frightened and which was sleepy and deciding that some of me was sleepy but all of me was frightened. And now, having come to a time of life when some terror should be a diversion, all of me was diverted though some of me was terrified. Hobart was running very slowly and glancing back at me now and then to nod reassuringly. The very sun was reassuring. The river and the Long Island ferry were reassuring. On such a day certainty is as easy as song. And by the time that we had reached the hills about Inglese I could have found it in my heart to telephone to Pelleas if he had been a block away: What a day. I love you.
Instead I sat quietly in the tonneau when, on the outskirts of the village, Hobart drew the car to the green crest of a little height. I found that the tonneau was geometrically in the one precise spot from which through pine- and fir-trees a look of the sea unrolled. Hobart is a perfect host and is always constructing these little altars to the inessential. On a journey Pelleas and he would remember to look out for the “view” as another man would think of trunk checks. But Pelleas and Hobart would remember trunk checks too and it is this combination which holds a woman captive.
“And down there,” said Hobart, looking the other way, “will be Viola of Inglese-in-the-valley. It sounds like an aria.”
“I wonder,” Pelleas observed on this, “whether Viola is still in love with our telephone. If I thought she was I should certainly take it out. I have never,” Pelleas added conscientiously, “taken one out. But I think I could. I’ve often thought I could. And that should do for him—that young Greek youth Telephone.”
“Her little nod of a letter,” said Hobart, “seemed very content. So content that either she must have forgotten all about your telephone or else she had him at her elbow. They say there are those two routes to content.”
Had Hobart himself found that first route, I wondered. For some years now we had seen him merely sitting out operas, handing tea, leading cotillons, and returning fans—urbane, complaisant, perfectly the social automaton. But always we had patiently hoped for him something gracious. Instead, had he merely found the content of some Forgetting? And if this was so he was in case still more sad than if he were unhappy. Either possibility grieved me. I am not unskillful with my needle and I found myself oddly longing to bring to bear my embroidery silks and cottons upon Hobart Eddy’s life. If only I might have embroidered on it a pattern of rosemary or heart’s-ease—ay, or even the rue.